Top 12 Fashion Moments of the Season: Deeny's Dozen

The marathon, four-weeks, 400-plus shows, international season that began in New York on February 9 ended in Paris this week. Here is our pick of the twelve best fashion moments, Deeny’s Dozen.

Without a doubt, the most agenda-setting designer in New York today is Khaite’s creative director and founder Catherine Holstein. In our dark era of destruction, as 24-hour news channels show wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, her Expressionist style is a telling symbol of our times. Her latest collection – shown on an all dark set worthy of a G. W. Pabst film on a Hudson River pier, was also her most emotive. Starkly sculpted coats, jackets and dresses, as if the fabric was thrown onto the models, then dimpled and scrunched into shape. In an era when women search for greater empowerment, Khaite’s vision of New York women is one of true liberation.

Deconstruction has never felt more feminist than at Prada this season. Dresses and coat-dresses classical at front, but lingerie at the back, or expanded trouser legs at the side. Skirts as if made of upside-down men’s blazers but cut so well they always looked stylish. Rippling technical calico coats with funnel necks in expansive 50s shapes. All suggesting an authoritative woman in search of love.   

The newest array of clothes by far in any collection was from Matthieu Blazy for Bottega Veneta. Cocoon shaped jackets or car coats with raised seams and hems; leather jerkins with bat wings, high collars and long cuffs; mega ruffled flamenco skirts or elongated cabans with low slung pockets. Everything was a little out of proportion, granting each look its allure. Devoid of print, free of embroidery, but constructed with true originality and boasting cool silhouettes anywhere.

In a season dominated by sculptural fashion, there was no greater sculptor of fabric than Nicolas Di Felice at Courrèges. Brilliant trench-dresses, that swept up in the air into funnel necks or bold coats with huge rising lapels in the house’s classic plastic covered jersey. Pocket placement at the front or around the hip of many coat dresses, sheathes and pants, imparting revolutionary shapes. Staged with brilliant Gallic panache, a white square amid wrought iron rafters of the 19th century market, at whose center rose a three meter heart beating to time.

No show anywhere is as hip today as Loewe by Jonathan Anderson, whose metaphysical set was dotted with works by naïve American artist Albert York, and whose front row was the envy of every other designer.

His leitmotif: modern-day morning dress; tailcoats, Etonian public school coats or elongated frocks. Though radically reimagined for 2025 - finished with unexpected beading or combined with gigantic silk pants in bold floral prints. The result was a highly decorative collection, where everyone seemed to be an outsider looking in on another world. Just like York, whose tiny paintings of small dogs and farm animals hung in billionaire’s homes on Park Avenue. 

No set anywhere was as immersive as Demna’s for Balenciaga. Where the floors, walls and ceilings were giant video screens built in a massive giant tent in front of Napoleon’s Tomb. Bucolic Alpine screens, giant snowy mountain cliffs morphing into a gigantic mashup of Tik Tok personalities. What a backdrop for a collection that reworked Balenciaga’s canon through Demna’s artistic lens. Opening with versions of founder’s Cristobal’s dresses – in midnight blue velvet, putty plissé silk or turquoise sequins, though each revamped with a hip-aulette, Balenciaga’s creative director Demna’s term for shoulder pads sewn into the hip. Artfully thrown-together dresses made of three upside-down or askew sweatshirts; repurposed wardrobe looks with a cool street grandeur, or wildly crumpled asymmetrical cocktails. Demna at his best.

A double winning season for Miuccia Prada, whose Miu Miu had the most contemporary cool wardrobe anywhere. In recent years, Miuccia seems bent on competing with Prada where she tag teams with Raf Simons. So far, she is winning this game. This season she showed an ideal Milanese wardrobe: double breasted slate gray herring bone coats, sprinkled with crystals; suede blazers sewn with strass; superb crushed silk cocktails, worn with long gloves in alligator or suede; or perfectly cut double-breasted redingotes with wee collars. Everything worked so splendidly. So, when 48 hours later Prada announced spectacular results, it was no surprise that revenues from Miu Miu had risen 56% last year.